334 p. : 23 cm

The Vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from eavesdroppers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it had been repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians, and soon became the ubiquitous voice of popular music. In How to Wreck a Nice Beach--from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase "how to recognize speech"--Music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from nazi research labs to Stalin's gulags, from the 1939 World's Fair to Hiroshima, from artificial larynges to Auto-Tune. We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, JFK, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Kraftwerk, the Cyclons, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized just before V-E Day, "We must go off!" And now vocoder technology is a cell phone standard, allowing a digital replica of your voice to sound human

Includes bibliographical references and index

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews